With the growth of distributed computing it has become common for many applications to seek access to other computers. Manufacturers of distributed computing platforms may want independent software producers to create applications to run on the distributed platform. Creating applications for a distributed platform is facilitated by exposing the internals of the distributed platform to the programming community. Such an exposed platform may be referred to as an open platform.
Although the platform developer may desire an open platform, the platform developer may still desire to restrict access to the platform to trusted applications that perform desired processes with no undesired effects. Conventionally, such access has been regulated by a software application. However, such a software application may itself not be provably trustworthy by the platform. Further, conventional access regulation systems have provided only a binary solution, either granting or denying access. Further still, many conventional access regulation systems generally provided application level verification.
As distributed platforms have become smaller, it has become more common to embed certain programs in the distributed platform. Some embedded programs may be developed and tested by the distributed platform manufacturer and thus may be considered trustworthy. Other embedded programs may have been developed and tested by third parties and thus may not be considered trustworthy. However, conventional access regulation systems may have treated such programs similarly.
Thus, there is a need for an access regulation system that is provably trustworthy, that can provide greater flexibility than a binary response and that can analyze and interact with a computing environment, rather than simply with stand alone applications.